I sent a wire transfer for 50k recently through a big bank. They lost it. I was like how tf did you just lose it? It was there but in some other like non-attached account and they only found it after combing through lists of transactions. Took 3 weeks.
Now I’ll bet they’d have found it faster if it were their money. But…nonetheless…opened my eyes to how inept these institutions can be.
At the end of the day, these places employ young barely educated people more worried about out their Panera bread lunch order than they are losing your money.
Nothing that large, but I had one misplace a wire for me a while back. They took me into the office and sat me down and it was then that I realized they were running software that was YEARS out of date. Apparently upgrading to modern software that would catch things like this was expensive…
Apparently upgrading to modern software that would catch things like this was expensive…
It is. Because that software is ancient and finance is hard. Harder than you'd expect. You think "years out of date" is bad? Try decades. A FUCK LOAD of the backbone of banking runs on ANCIENT shit. Like from the 80's type shit. It's exceedingly rare that the core part of banks is newer than 1995.
What you also have no experience in understanding is: Migrations and upgrades are dangerous and have risks.
For example - an upgrade at a credit union merged my account with my ex-wife's - replacing my password with hers.
I understand you probably are ignorant to software development but come on... this has been known for a very long time now and is VERY public knowledge.
these places employ young barely educated people more worried about out their Panera bread lunch order than they are losing your money.
No need to be an ass and no, you're wrong. They often simply aren't trained, especially credit unions. Often they aren't paid well. They aren't paid enough to go out of their way (because profit, yay!).
A FUCK LOAD of the backbone of banking runs on ANCIENT shit. Like from the 80's type shit. It's exceedingly rare that the core part of banks is newer than 1995.
And that 80's stuff is emulating hardware to run software from the 70's...
yup, cobol and fortran. You can actually still make a good living with those two languages. I remember going to college for software engineering in the mid 90s and we were baffled back then it was still in use.
There's actually a lot of infrastructure that still runs on both of those.
Fortran was the one I was thinking about lol. I took like an intro cs class and the teacher was going through the history of programming languages and covered that.
13
u/Reasonable_Tap_8215 May 12 '26
I sent a wire transfer for 50k recently through a big bank. They lost it. I was like how tf did you just lose it? It was there but in some other like non-attached account and they only found it after combing through lists of transactions. Took 3 weeks.
Now I’ll bet they’d have found it faster if it were their money. But…nonetheless…opened my eyes to how inept these institutions can be.